"I don't suppose you want them framed, too."

"No, Buddy, that won't be necessary. Just the photos."

I stepped back while Buddy sat down on the cushioned stool in front of the computer. He turned on a nearby printer, loaded in photo-quality paper, and expertly went through the commands that sent the seven pictures to the printer. Again I noted his ease with the equipment. I had the feeling that there wasn't any content on the laptop that he was not familiar with. Probably nothing in the file boxes on the bunk above us either.

"Okay," he said as he got up. 'Takes about a minute for each one. They come out a bit sticky, too. Might want to spread 'em out till they dry all the way. I'll go up and see what the charter book says about your mystery man."

After he was gone I sat down on the stool. I had watched how Lockridge worked the photo files and was a quick learner. I went back to the main listing and double- clicked on the photo folder labeled mail call. A frame opened containing 36 small photos in a grid. I clicked on the first one and the photo enlarged. It showed Graciela pushing a stroller with a little girl sleeping in it. Cielo Azul. Terry's daughter. The setting appeared to be a shopping mall. The photo was similar to Terry's photos of the mystery man in that it appeared that Graciela did not know she was being photographed.

I turned around and looked back through the doorway toward the steps to the salon. There was no sign of Lockridge. I got up and moved quietly into the hallway. I slipped through the open door of the bathroom. I pressed myself against the wall and waited. Soon enough Lockridge moved across the opening in the hall, carrying the logbook. He was moving very quietly so as to make no noise. I let him pass and then moved into the hallway behind him. I watched as he went through the door of the forward stateroom, ready to startle me with his sudden appearance again.

But it was Lockridge who was startled when he realized I wasn't in the room. When he turned I was right behind him.

"You like sneaking up on people, don't you, Buddy?"

"Uh, no, not really. I was just-"

"Don't do it with me, okay? What's it say in the book?"

His face took on a pink hue beneath the permanent fisherman's tan. But I had given him an out and he quickly took it.

'Terry put his name down in the book but nothing else. It says 'Jordan Shandy, half day.' That's it."

He opened the book and turned it to show me the entry. "What about his method of payment? How much is half a day anyway?"

"Three bills for a half, five for a full. I checked the credit-card log and there was nothing there. Also the checking deposits. Nothing. That means he paid cash."

"When was this? I assume it is logged by date."

"Yeah. They went out on February thirteenth-hey, that was Friday the thirteenth. Think that was intentional?"

"Who knows? Was that before or after the charter with Finder?"

Lockridge put the logbook down on the desk so we could both look at it. He ran his finger down the list of clients and stopped it at Finder.

"He came a week after. He went out February nineteenth."

"And what's the date on the sheriff's report on the boat burglary?"

"Shit, I have to go back up."

He left and I heard him bound up the stairs. I took the first photo out of the printer and put it on the desk. It was the shot of Jordan Shandy hiding his face with sunglasses and the Spanish mackerel. I stared at it until Lockridge came back into the room. He didn't try to sneak up on me this time.

"We made the burglary report February twenty-second."

I nodded. Five weeks before McCaleb's death. I wrote all the dates we had been talking about down in my notebook. I wasn't sure if there was significance to any of it.

"Okay," I said. "You want to do one more thing for me now, Buddy?" "Sure. What?"

"Go on up and take those rods down off the ceiling and go out and wash them down. I don't think anybody did it after that last trip. They're making this place smell sour and I think I'm going to be hanging out here for a couple days. It would help me a lot."

"You want me to go up and wash off the rods."

He said it like a statement, a treatise of insult and disappointment. I looked from the photo to his face.

"Yes, that's right. It would help me a lot. I'll finish up with the photos and then we can go visit Otto Woodall."

"Whatever."

He left the room dejected and I heard him trudge up the steps, equally as loud as he had been silent before. I took the second photo out of the printer and placed it down next to the first. I took a black marker out of a coffee mug on the desk and wrote in the white border beneath the photo the name Jordan Shandy.

Back on the stool I turned my attention once again to the computer and the photo of Graciela and her daughter. I clicked on the forward arrow and the next photo came up. Again it was a photo from inside a mall. This one was taken from a further distance and there was a grainy quality to it. Also in this picture was a boy trailing behind Graciela. The son, I concluded. The adopted son.

Everyone in the family was in the photo but Terry. Was he the photographer? If so, why at such a distance? I clicked the arrow again and then continued through the photos. Almost all of them were from inside the mall and all were taken from a distance. In not one photo was any family member looking at or acknowledging the camera. After twenty-eight similar shots the venue changed and the family was now on the ferry to Catalina. They were heading home and the photographer was there along with them.

There were only four photos in this sequence. In each of these Graciela sat in the middle rear of the ferry's main cabin, the boy and girl on either side of her. The photographer had been positioned near the front of the cabin, shooting across several rows of seats. If Graciela had noticed, she probably would not have realized that she was the center of the camera's focus and would have dismissed the photographer as just another tourist going to Catalina.

The last two photos of the thirty-six seemed out of place with the others, as if they were part of a completely different project. The first was of a green highway sign. I enlarged it and saw that it had been shot through the windshield of a car. I could see the frame of the windshield, part of the dashboard and some sort of sticker in the corner of the glass. Part of the photographer's hand, resting on the steering wheel at eleven o'clock, was also in the picture.

The highway sign stood against a barren desert landscape. It said

ZZYZX ROAD I MILE

I knew the road. Or, more accurately, I knew the sign. Anybody from L.A. who made the road trip to and from Las Vegas as often as I had in the last year would have known it. At just about the halfway point on the 15 free- way was the Zzyzx Road exit, recognizable by its unique name if nothing else. It was in the Mojave and it appeared to be a road to nowhere. No gas station, no rest stop. At the end of the alphabet at the end of the world.

The last photo was equally puzzling. I enlarged it and saw that it was a strange still life. At center in the frame was an old boat-the rivets of its wooden planks sprung and its yellowed paint peeling back under the blistering sun. It sat on the rocky terrain of the desert, seemingly miles from any water on which to float. A boat adrift on a sea of sand. If there was any specific meaning at all to it, I did not readily see it.

Following the procedure I had watched Lockridge use, I printed the two desert photos and then went back to review the other photos to choose a sampling of shots to print. I sent two photos from the ferry and two photos from the mall to the printer. While I waited I enlarged several of the mall shots on the screen in hopes of seeing something in the background that would identify what mall Graciela and the children were in. I knew I could simply ask her. But I wasn't sure I wanted to.